Cars and traffic lights scintillate in twilight fogginess, that the visibility is weakened by the precession of lights is evident, though where he stands, an inevitable detachment grows, within and without, however, since he alone, he waits, letting the diurnal lights flicker without further notice. Before him, the great in-between, that natural movement between the cleaved realms, as sundered as it has recently become, retains the savage noble; it is still singular, dark, teeming with yellow eyes, impossibly sharp fangs and the will to use them with no remorse, no ethics to violate, and no man to tell it no. The dying howls, though, are mechanical; plants are dying limbs in the dark and in light, people, penumbras to the alleys and to each other, but all is singular to this ancient canopy where man has long affixed half a world, and the claws that reach out for their meat, still red, retract into sad desperation, not predatory limb. Eyes are passably human, but there is no human will behind them; where there should be two eyes is just one glassy surface and a red dot, connected to miles of wire, ending at another mechanical process; if you aren’t afraid, he knows, the eyes will never leave you; they watch, they hunt, never ending. This is a cityscape, the recent innovation in humanity’s self-terror, another experiment of darkness, on where the likeness of carbon has been decanted and extruded at will, taken on multiplexed hues, liquid and solid, powering the ambition of centuries. Where the vehicles of this blessed carbon scream into the nights, hurling man into injuries, ejecting stupidity into lacuna, unbroken by centuries; where great walls, erected to the usual Gods, are just as powerful, demanding, and pointless – he is immune to these greater expressions by virtue youth, thus his focus presently demands only attention to frailties of the juvenile mind. City busses escaped benighted corners and dash into other ones, leaving their vapors to mix around him, and this is comforting; never in his short life has he known poignancy without a bus spewing itself onto him to mark the occasion. So pollution becomes a ritual for a child, of course, one inherited from the city – and where those dark corners end, he has seen the terminus; he knows, as well as any city child, where they can take him and where they will not. He consumed the remnant his apple fritter, washing down the final lump of sweet paste with hot milk, the viscid hydrocarbon endogenous, the one exterior, adulterate together. The smell of his father’s coffee still lingered around him, so he thought of his father, the wise and unwise gesticulations of wisdom he was prone to, the melancholy of a growing list of lost things, and the morning bus ride he takes by himself. The boy could still hear the bus that carried off his father to his job. It went eastward, into the center of the city, full of people. The boy watched his father wave goodbye, though before leaving, the father stayed long enough to enjoy a pastry with him. The day’s warmth is already threatening from under the purple dawn sky. Heated times ahead, he knows. The boy leans on suitcase, freeway humming leans on him, props up more delusions of safety, quiet. Distorted into the background relief of buildings and trash, the parking lots on the other side of the freeway towering behind him, are rapidly filling; the busses balefully charged forward with their own caffeinated purposes, moving the evening aside; the boy, still awakening, considers his first day of school. He is hopeful, guarded, as he should be, but not afraid, at least, not now. There will be some awkwardness, he knows, then an equilibrium, and finally resolution; there is a comforting solemnity to this ritual of first days that he has come to accept.